Weekly crawls of up to three pages across all three search surfaces. Not just a diff — every change arrives with a read on why they most likely did it and what the counter-move is.
Most $10/mo trackers watch title tags. The interesting moves are happening in the other two pillars.
Title and meta rewrites, H1 and H2 changes with the exact headings quoted, body-copy edits, content volume swings, price changes, canonical moves, and index-directive flips.
Structured data added or removed by type, marked-up Q&A pairs appearing, tables appearing or vanishing, new question-form headings, and movement in the page's citation-readiness score.
Per-bot AI crawler permission changes across all 12 major crawlers, llms.txt appearing or disappearing, and nosnippet/noarchive directives being added or lifted.
A diff is a fact you still have to interpret. The read is the product.
Now you work out what it means, whether it matters, and what to do. Most people file it and move on — which is why most $10 tracker subscriptions get cancelled in month two.
One tier. The free tier exists so you can prove it works on one page before paying.
Stated up front, because finding out in month two is how you lose a customer for good.
Google AI Overviews has no public API. Nothing at $10/mo can genuinely tell you "you lost a citation in an AI Overview last Tuesday", and anything claiming to is either scraping at a scale that breaks, or guessing.
What Watchdog tracks instead is every input to that outcome: crawler permission, snippet permission, answer structure, schema, and citation-readiness score over time. Those move before the citation does. Perplexity does have an API — if you want live checks there, it can be switched on with a key.
Watchdog monitors what competitors publish. It is not a rank tracker and does not report positions. If you need daily keyword positions, that is a different tool and you should buy one.
It reads the raw HTML, like the AI crawlers it is modelling. For a competitor whose site renders client-side, Watchdog sees what GPTBot sees — which is the point, but it means copy injected by JavaScript will not appear in a diff.
On the weekly schedule a change can be up to seven days old when you see it, and your first change report is a week after signup because a baseline needs a second observation to diff against. Daily scanning exists in the schema but is not offered at $10 — the crawl cost is real.
If you are blocking GPTBot or serving an empty page to crawlers, watching competitors is the wrong problem to solve first. Takes five seconds and needs no account.
Use Watchdog's changes as a prompt to investigate, not as a verdict: a competitor's new page or schema is worth a look at their backlinks and at how AI systems read them with the AI Readiness Scanner. If you would rather have the monitoring interpreted for you, that is part of our AEO and GEO consulting.